Both the 2020 Vital Congregations facilitator training and national gathering in Austin, scheduled for April 24-30, have been postponed. The Office of Vital Congregations in the Presbyterian Mission Agency is looking at the possibility of rescheduling the event in August 2020.
When the Rev. Dr. Jeri Parris Perkins became pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Clinton, South Carolina, she knew the congregation needed to revitalize. It’s what the Pastor Nominating Committee was looking for when the church called her in 2014.
Justice is at the very heart of who God is, Professor Rebecca Davis of Union Presbyterian Seminary said during a Thursday workshop at the annual gathering of the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators. And justice is not a political issue — it’s a biblical issue. “We must come to grips with that,” she said to an overflow workshop crowd, “if we are going to be faithful to the witness of the church.”
The PC(USA)’s Office of Vital Congregations will hold a conference in April in Austin to help congregations and presbyteries learn to have a more vital life together in Christ and reach out in service to their communities.
In general, smaller- and medium-sized congregations in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), together with their counterparts in the Episcopal Church, assigned themselves higher scores as part of a vital congregations survey than larger congregations.
Three presbyteries — Trinity, Newark and San Jose — have finished up a pilot program of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Vital Congregations initiative’s two-year revitalization process.
According to the Rev. (Capt.) Lyman M. Smith, director of the Presbyterian Council for Chaplains and Military Personnel, “more than 18 million veterans live among us. And of those 18 million, some 18 are likely to die by suicide today.”
Since 2007, a collection of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) church histories has been entrusted to the C. Benton Kline, Jr. Special Collections and Archives at Columbia Theological Seminary. The collection holds the histories of 5,800 PC(USA) congregations from 42 states. This enormous collection occupies close to 1,200 cubic feet and continues to grow every year.
